Half the Weight, Half the Fuel, Half the Tires, Half a Chance

Now that the revolutionary DeltaWing has seen success, does the car have a future?

On the Wednesday before the 2012 Petit Le Mans at Road Atlanta, the DeltaWing experimental racer was knocked out of practice after colliding with a GTC Porsche. The accident happened under the bridge before the main straight and sent the DeltaWing and its driver, Gunnar Jeannette, into a roll. The incident served as a stark flashback to Le Mans, when the DeltaWing was punted into a wall by one of the top-running Toyotas. Unlike that outing, the Georgia accident ended with the car returning to the pits, albeit on a rollback.

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After a last-minute rebuild by its team, the DeltaWing took the green flag in Georgia on Saturday. The car ran as an unclassified experimental entry and was required to start in forty-second place—dead last. It did not stay there long. Jeannette, who has thousands of laps around Road Atlanta, was told to take it easy, but even that meant passing eight cars in the first two laps and climbing solidly into the top ten within the first hour. A thousand miles later, the DeltaWing cruised under the checkered flag in sixth place. (The position was later amended to fifth when a higher-finishing car was disqualified.)

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So what was it like out there, Gunnar? "It was 100 percent problem-free," Jeannette said. "We changed tires, even though we really didn't need to, and added fuel. That was all.

"Honestly, if I was able to blindfold you and put you behind the wheel, you'd never know you weren't in a conventional car. It's an engineering marvel, a true testament to the thought process behind the design. A true testament to Ben Bowlby."

Bowlby, a laser-focused, bushy-eyebrowed Brit, is the mind behind the DeltaWing. In 2008, he was working as an engineer for motorsport magnate Chip Ganassi when he conceived a race car so far outside the box—mid-engine, with a super-narrow nose and wide rear—that some colleagues suspected he had lost it completely. With Ganassi's blessing, Bowlby built a full-scale model and presented it at the 2010 Chicago Auto Show. At the time, IndyCar was soliciting designs to replace its aging Dallara chassis. Bowlby and Ganassi threw their car into the ring.

IndyCar rejected the design and eventually went with a new Dallara. But Bowlby didn't give up, enlisting a cast of believers including Dan Gurney's All-American Racers, Highcroft Racing, and Michelin. The latter designed ultra-lightweight rubber for the car from scratch, as no one offered racing slicks that fit on the DeltaWing's four-inch-wide front tires. For the 2012 running of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the Automobile Club de l'Ouest, the Le Mans sanctioning body, agreed to give the car the so-called "Garage 56," an exhibition slot reserved annually for genuinely innovative projects.

Less than six hours into the race, DeltaWing driver Satoshi Motoyama was booted into a wall by one of the toprunning Toyotas. In the garage, a beyond-exhausted Bowlby wondered aloud whether the DeltaWing would ever get another chance to race. Even if it didn't, he said, "They knew we were here, and they know the car works."

Thanks to help from American Le Mans Series and Road Atlanta owner Don Panoz, the DeltaWing got another shot. The car was allowed to run at the ALMS's season-ending Petit Le Mans event, in October; the machine that competed there was the same DeltaWing from Le Mans (and the only DeltaWing there is), repaired of crash damage and given shorter gearing but otherwise unchanged.

The four-cylinder engine that the DeltaWing raced with at Le Mans was billed as a Nissan, but it was built largely from Chevrolet parts by England's Ray Mallock Engineering, which built the fours that won the 2011 World Touring Car Championship in a Chevrolet Cruze. The DeltaWing did, at least, sport a throttle body from a Nissan Juke.

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So there Bowlby's team was, starting in last place and finishing fifth, unscathed. From the beginning, the DeltaWing's sell line was half the fuel, half the tires, half the weight, same speed. Did the car live up to its billing?

During the race, Nissan representatives monitored the fuel usage of both the DeltaWing and the Conquest Racing P2 prototype, which used a Nissan V-8. The DeltaWing used 55 percent as much fuel as the Conquest car.

As for tires, the DeltaWing sometimes went four pit stops between changes, and that only because the Michelin engineers wanted to look them over. The tires suffered almost no wear, and performance didn't degrade on longer runs. As for heft, the minimum weight of a P2 car is 900 kilograms, or nearly 2,000 pounds. In Le Mans trim, the DeltaWing weighed 465 kilograms, or 1,025 pounds. Close enough.

So how did Bowlby's design stack up in its first real test? Let's compare it to a midpack P2 car—the No. 27 Dempsey Racing Lola-Judd driven by Patrick Dempsey, Joe Foster, and Dane Cameron. Gunnar Jeannette qualified the DeltaWing tenth-quickest, at 1 minute, 12.850 seconds. Cameron qualified the Dempsey car in position thirteen, with a time of 1 minute, 13.214 seconds and an average speed of 124.894 mph on the 2.54-mile Road Atlanta circuit. The Dempsey machine ran as high as third before it crashed out, but Cameron and Foster had plenty of shared track time with the DeltaWing.

"It was extremely fast in a straight line," Cameron said. "With no wings, there is no drag. It was like a rocket ship. The guys who have driven it tell me it just never stops accelerating."

Foster, formerly the chief instructor for a Road Atlanta-based driving school, said the DeltaWing takes a similar line through the corners as a P2 car, although "it seems to turn in a little earlier. It's very good under braking, but I think we could out-brake it just a bit in most corners."

Still, questions remain. Last October, it was announced that the DeltaWing will race in the American Le Mans Series in 2013 and compete with other cars. What other cars? "They haven't told us yet," said team spokesman Paul Ryan, although the assumption is P2. And for how long will it run? The ALMS and Grand-Am are set to merge for 2014, with Grand-Am and its parent company, NASCAR, holding four of the six seats on the resulting series' board of directors. At least one Grand-Am employee expressed skepticism as to whether the DeltaWing would fit into that world. If the car is going to make an impression, it needs to do so quickly.

That may not be easy. While Panoz says there is customer interest in the car, there is to date no factory in which to build it, no price, and—perhaps the most serious concern of all—no crashtested tub. The current DeltaWing is built from a cast-off Aston Martin shell, but that tub was once crash-tested by the ACO, and testing is very expensive. Assuming its makers want to maintan ACO approval, which tub customer DeltaWings would use is unclear.

That approval also comes with a cost ceiling. According to the Le Mans rulebook, a P2 prototype with engine can't cost more than 430,000 euros— about $552,000 at press time, which, incidentally, is cheaper than a Daytona Prototype. Can the DeltaWing be built and sold by this March's running of the 12 Hours of Sebring, and for $552,000 or less? No one seems able to answer that question.

Regardless, for Ben Bowlby, Petit was a confirmation. But even he doesn't know what's next.

"The question is," he said, "is this car a stepping stone to something else, or will it have a life of its own? Frankly, there's a lot of unfinished business. It can be a lot faster than it is."

Joe Foster, who has a master's degree in mechanical engineering, loves Bowlby's project, though he remains unconvinced that it has a future as a mass-market customer race car.

"With my engineer hat on," he says, "I love the shit out of that thing. It's the automotive equivalent of proving that the world is round when we all thought it was flat. We were making fun of it, but on the straightaway, that thing drove by me like I was tied to a post."

And he looks forward to seeing the car on the track next year. "I think it would be great to see some low-preservation, high-testosterone kid like Gunnar out there driving [it] around, passing us all. And I'll make sure I don't hit it."